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I recently expanded our tattoo removal services to include advanced laser tattoo removal training and business consulting for folks wanting to dive into this career. I spent last weekend in Tulsa with Lori and Donnie Barnes, the owners of Tulsa’s first dedicated laser tattoo removal center….Tat-toodaloo. The Barnes have spent the past 3 months training/interning with us and we are thrilled to see them hit the ground running!

They were smart and chose the new Q-Plus C tattoo removal laser as their ‘tool of choice’, meaning they will have success in removing all colors of ink. Both Donnie and Lori have had removal sessions at another place in Tulsa that produced very disappointing results. Their experience there spawned their idea of opening a dedicated PROFESSIONAL laser tattoo removal clinic, offering a clean and friendly environment while utilizing the best possible equipment on the market today.

When I decided to open a laser tattoo removal clinic in early 2006, I spent weeks scrutinizing the various Q-Switched YAG lasers that were available at the time. There weren’t any on the market that could easily clear blue/green/purple ink. I chose the best at that time and over the years there were upgrades made to it that would allow better clearance of the blue-based inks….but still not a great option.

In the past 7 years, I’ve had 5+ ‘Demo’ lasers in our office from various laser manufacturers that we put thru their paces, anticipating some superb results on the difficult colors. We weren’t impressed with any of them. have had such great success removing most tattoos to 99.5% ink clearance with no tissue ablation or scarring (which is always our ultimate goal)…there wasn’t an option on the market that would allow the same great results that we’ve delivered AND effectively cleared blue-based ink. Until now…

I am so thrilled to have the new Quanta Q Plus C in our office! I thought it was probably too good to be true, but after spending months using it and seeing the great results, I’m convinced this is the best option we’ve seen on the market in the past 8 years. In fact, I was planning to hold onto our other laser as a ‘back-up’ just in case this wasn’t what we were expecting, but after using it for only a few weeks, I’ve retired it permanently.

When word got out that Ink-B-Gone was shopping around for a new tattoo removal laser, there were quite a few companies that came to us with their best options. There is a new pico-second laser that has been getting a lot of media attention lately…but after seeing a handful of tattoos that had been treated with that laser, we realized the results were no better than the results of the Q Plus C, and the pico-second laser doesn’t work on red or orange ink. The cost was more than double the cost of the Q Plus C, which means we would have to pass that cost on to the client. NOT an attractive option for us.

We see things every day, from the moment we get up in the morning until we go to sleep at night. We look at everything around us using light. We appreciate kids’ crayon drawings, fine oil paintings, swirling computer graphics, gorgeous sunsets, a blue sky, shooting stars and rainbows. We rely on mirrors to make ourselves presentable, and sparkling gemstones to show affection. But did you ever stop to think that when we see any of these things, we are not directly connected to it? We are, in fact, seeing light — light that somehow left objects far or near and reached our eyes. Light is all our eyes can really see.

The other key to a laser is a pair of mirrors, one at each end of the lasing medium. Photons, with a very specific wavelength and phase, reflect off the mirrors to travel back and forth through the lasing medium. In the process, they stimulate other electrons to make the downward energy jump and can cause the emission of more photons of the same wavelength and phase. A cascade effect occurs, and soon we have propagated many, many photons of the same wavelength and phase. The mirror at one end of the laser is “half-silvered,” meaning it reflects some light and lets some light through. The light that makes it through is the laser light.

Ways of Thinking About Light

You have probably heard two different ways of talking about light:
There is the “particle” theory, expressed in part by the word photon.
There is the “wave” theory, expressed by the term light wave.
From the time of the ancient Greeks, people have thought of light as a stream of tiny particles. After all, light travels in straight lines and bounces off a mirror much like a ball bouncing off a wall. No one had actually seen particles of light, but even now it’s easy to explain why that might be. The particles could be too small, or moving too fast, to be seen, or perhaps our eyes see right through them.

The idea of the light wave came from Christian Huygens, who proposed in the late 1600s that light acted like a wave instead of a stream of particles. In 1807, Thomas Young backed up Huygens’ theory by showing that when light passes through a very narrow opening, it can spread out, and interfere with light passing through another opening. Young shined a light through a very narrow slit. What he saw was a bright bar of light that corresponded to the slit. But that was not all he saw. Young also perceived additional light, not as bright, in the areas around the bar. If light were a stream of particles, this additional light would not have been there. This experiment suggested that light spread out like a wave. In fact, a beam of light radiates outward at all times.

Albert Einstein advanced the theory of light further in 1905. Einstein considered the photoelectric effect, in which ultraviolet light hits a surface and causes electrons to be emitted from the surface. Einstein’s explanation for this was that light was made up of a stream of energy packets called photons.

Modern physicists believe that light can behave as both a particle and a wave, but they also recognize that either view is a simple explanation for something more complex. In this article, we will talk about light as waves, because this provides the best explanation for most of the phenomena our eyes can see.

Lasers show up in an amazing range of products and technologies. You will find them in everything from CD players to dental drills to high-speed metal cutting machines to measuring systems. They all use lasers. But what is a laser? And what makes a laser beam different from the beam of a flashlight?
Laser light is very different from normal light. Laser light has the following properties:

The light released is monochromatic. It contains one specific wavelength of light (one specific color). The wavelength of light is determined by the amount of energy released when the electron drops to a lower orbit.

The light released is coherent. It is “organized” — each photon moves in step with the others. This means that all of the photons have wave fronts that launch in unison.

The light is very directional. A laser light has a very tight beam and is very strong and concentrated. A flashlight, on the other hand, releases light in many directions, and the light is very weak and diffuse.

To make these three properties occur takes something called stimulated emission. This does not occur in your ordinary flashlight — in a flashlight, all of the atoms release their photons randomly. In stimulated emission, photon emission is organized.

The photon that any atom releases has a certain wavelength that is dependent on the energy difference between the excited state and the ground state. If this photon (possessing a certain energy and phase) should encounter another atom that has an electron in the same excited state, stimulated emission can occur. The first photon can stimulate or induce atomic emission such that the subsequent emitted photon (from the second atom) vibrates with the same frequency and direction as the incoming photon.

The other key to a laser is a pair of mirrors, one at each end of the lasing medium. Photons, with a very specific wavelength and phase, reflect off the mirrors to travel back and forth through the lasing medium. In the process, they stimulate other electrons to make the downward energy jump and can cause the emission of more photons of the same wavelength and phase. A cascade effect occurs, and soon we have propagated many, many photons of the same wavelength and phase. The mirror at one end of the laser is “half-silvered,” meaning it reflects some light and lets some light through. The light that makes it through is the laser light.